Jarnal - External Helpers

by David K. Levine

Jarnal (the application only) supports external programs for special purposes. These three programs are the pdfrenderer, the ps2pdf program and the web-browser. Defaults are set for all three, but can be modified by editing the jarnalshell.conf file created in your home directory after you first run Jarnal. If you aren't sure where your home directory is, check the About box in Jarnal. The default jarnalshell.conf file is

pdfrenderer=gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dFirstPage=%1 -dLastPage=%2 -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=%3 -r%4 -f %5
ps2pdf=ps2pdf %1 %2
browser=firefox %1

Here the %n will be replaced by the appropriate arguments when the external program is called. Simply replace the command on the right-hand-side of the equality with the program of your choice. The defaults assume the programs gs, ps2pdf and firefox exist and are in your search path.

The pdfrenderer is used when Jarnal is invoked with the -g command line option to render pdf files. The ps2pdf is used to print pdf files no longer used and the browser is used to view non-.jaj hyperlinks. With the ghostscript renderer, you can improve the quality of the image at the expense of speed by adding the switch -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4

From Michael Ellerbeck for Windows here is the procedure for using ghostscript:

WriteOnPDF.cmd - macro to annotate a PDF file
java -Xmx256m -jar c:\jarnal-install\jarnal.jar -t  c:\jarnal-install\templates\annotate.jaj -g -b %1 %2 %3 %4 %5

Use this with the following option in jarnalshell.conf to use ghostscript as the PDF renderer; note especially the quotes around %5 to deal correctly with files that have spaces in their names

pdfrenderer=C:\gs\gs8.50\bin\gswin32c -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -d  -dGraphicsAlphaBits=4 -dTextAlphaBits=4 -dFirstPage=%1 -dLastPage=%2  -sDEVICE=png16m -sOutputFile=%3 -r%4 -f "%5"